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Planning more efficiently with the Crowdsurfer app

Web - Discovery Bootcamp - MVP

Orange is one of Belgium’s largest telecom companies, offering telephone and internet services to millions of customers. Together with them and acTVty, a production and events company specialising in audiovisual content, our experts developed Crowdsurfer. Crowdsurfer is a platform that visualises how crowded locations are so users can plan their trips more efficiently. You can use it on desktops and as a mobile application.

The challenge..

The platform uses anonymised data from Orange’s cell phone towers as input for a data feed made by Cropland. With the technological backbone and anonymisation being taken care of, our key challenge was launching the application as soon as possible. Crowdsurfer needed to deliver added value to its users without a lot of bells and whistles.

Our approach

We started with our Discovery Bootcamp: a series of workshops in which we mapped the most important aspects together with the client. We identified a map with zones and a search function as the key features for the MVP.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the first working iteration of an application and contains only the most essential functionalities. As a development team, an MVP lets you:

Quickly launch and test a digital solution
Learn from users what actually works so you can set functional priorities
Prevent resources being wasted on developing unnecessary functionalities
Lay the groundwork for further development and scaling

With the MVP’s scope defined, we used short iterations (sprints) to develop Crowdsurfer and collect feedback. Our primary task was visualising Cropland’s data feed without negatively impacting performance and user experience. Since there are a lot of data points and the application needed to be dynamic, this turned out to be an interesting challenge.

Once we got the data part up and running, we continued with the map and search function. Our designer helped us set up a user interface (UI) that combined these aspects in a user-friendly way.

Looking back..

In this project, we used algorithms and applications to bring Orange’s data closer to its customers through various channels. The combination of an MVP and anonymised data enabled us to build a performing application relatively quickly.

What we delivered is just the first iteration of Crowdsurfer, however. In the next iterations, we hope to add features like predictions and reminders to make the platform even more user-friendly.